Days after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fled Kabul, his daughter artist Mariam Ghani urged his more than 3,000 Instagram followers to sign an online petition, which demanded that the US and “governments around the world” come to the rescue of refugees, including cultural workers, trapped in Afghanistan and at the mercy of the Taliban killers.
By then, news had spread that his father and mother, Afghanistan’s first lady, Rula Ghani, had a relative luxury in the United Arab Emirates and that his father had reportedly extracted tens of millions of dollars from Afghanistan when they fled in August. 15.
Meanwhile, Mariam, 43, was filing appeals from her sunny millionaire loft in a converted Clinton Hill factory building.
“I am angry and sad and have a terrible fear for the family, friends and colleagues who remain in Afghanistan and I work feverishly to do everything I can on their behalf,” he told his followers.
His brother Tarek, 39, who has a limited social media presence, saw the chaos moving into Afghanistan from the $ 1.2 million house in Washington, DC he shares with his wife, Beth Pearson. They are a growing power couple in the U.S. capital: Pearson, a Rhodes scholar, is a senior aide to Senator Elizabeth Warren; Tarek, a professor of business strategy, was an adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Tarek and his sister have spent their lives connected to Democratic Party elites and owe their education and, in part, their livelihoods to multimillion-dollar Democratic donors, the same power players who have funded their father throughout his career as a technocrat at the World Bank and in leadership positions in his native Afghanistan.
Ashraf, 72, became president of Afghanistan in 2014, but previously raised hundreds of thousands annually as president of the Institute for State Effectiveness, a nonprofit organization. of Washington, DC which he co-founded in 2007. The group is working to “develop integrated approaches to state building” and by 2007 received a $ 40 million grant from the Clinton Global Initiative, the nonprofit organization. of profit founded by the former president.
His wife, Rula, 73, is co-chair of the Afghan Women’s Council at Georgetown University, alongside U.S. first ladies Hillary Clinton and Laura Bush.
The Ashraf group has also received support from Open Society Foundations, created by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, which has given billions to liberal causes around the world.
Ahsraf’s connections to the billionaire and the Clintons opened doors for his children in elite political and academic circles, a political observer who knows the family told The Post.
“It’s about who you know when you reach a certain level in Washington,” said Jordan Schneider, U.S. chief of operations for the nonprofit Detined International, which worked at the U.S. embassy in Kabul in late of the nineties. “He [Ashraf Ghani] he did exactly what any father would have done for his children. “
***
Mariam Ghani was born in Brooklyn in 1981, while her father was pursuing graduate work in anthropology at Columbia University. Ashraf, who is part of the majority Pashtun tribe in Afghanistan, grew up in a wealthy and “prominent” Afghan family and spent a year as an exchange student at an Oregon high school. He met his wife, a Lebanese Christian, at the American University of Beirut.
After the Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan in 1979, the couple decided to go into exile in the United States, eventually settling in a lush middle-class neighborhood of Baltimore, where Ashraf occupied a teaching position at Johns Hopkins. In 1991 he began his 11-year career at the World Bank and became a UN adviser.
At some point, Rula received a real estate license, which expired two years ago, according to public records that also show he owns a condominium in DC.
The family’s Democratic Party connections were consolidated after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Ashraf’s tenure at the World Bank. That same year, Mariam, a budding artist and activist, received a scholarship from the Soros family to fund her film and video studies.
A year after graduating with a degree in comparative literature from New York University in 2000, he received a Paul and Daisy Soros Scholarship for New Americans to study photography and film at the School of Visual Arts, an art university. and Manhattan design that charges more than $ 40,000 a year in tuition.
It is unclear how much money he received from the Mariam Foundation, whose activist work of art has focused on criminal justice reform. Currently run by the widow of Paul Soros, George’s late brother transport magnate, the organization awards only 30 scholarships a year to immigrants or their children to pursue graduate work. Today, these scholarships are worth $ 90,000, according to the foundation’s website.
Nine years later, Tarek received the same scholarship to pursue a doctorate at UC, Berkeley, where he had already completed a master’s degree in business administration in 2012. He met his wife, Beth, at the school where she worked with the his own doctorate. .D in sociology between 2009 and 2015, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Neither Mariam nor Tarek Ghani returned requests for comments from The Post.
From a young age, Tarek seemed determined to follow in his father’s footsteps, looking for interests in global economics and conflict studies. While a teenager in Baltimore, he cut his political teeth by working as a researcher on the first candidacy for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in his 2000 career, according to public records.
When his father became finance minister after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Tarek took a year out of college at Stanford to travel to Kabul, where he worked to help his father in stabilize the country’s currency.
Mariam joined her brother in Afghanistan in 2002, when she was 24 years old. It was the first time the brothers had traveled to their father’s country of birth.
When I grew up with an Afghan father and a Lebanese mother in the United States, “I never think of myself as a privileged person when I’m working,” Mariam said in an interview on Facebook.
Afghanistan has shaped Mariam’s work, which has been exhibited at such prominent institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in London. In recent years, it has focused on an ongoing project, the Missing Persons Index, a facility that documents the abuse and torture of prisoners by the U.S. military in Iraq and the United States. ‘Afghanistan.
In 2015, father and daughter collaborated on a work for the Venice Biennale, “Afghanistan: A Lexicon,” which uses 100 illustrations with titles that contain “deliberate attempts to reimagine the country” throughout their turbulent modern history.
An earlier video reflects on the legacy of police violence in Ferguson, Mo, after Michael Brown’s death in police in 2014. At the time, she was a visiting professor at the University of Washington in the nearby city of St. Louis. Louis, where he completed “The City & The City,” a film that reflected the deep divisions in the area during the protests and riots that followed Brown’s death.
Like her sister, Tarek has focused on poverty and abuse of power: war, structural inequality and climate change, as well as security and strategy in the global economy, according to her Twitter profile.
For the last two years he took a break from teaching at the University of Washington in St. Louis to working as a chief economist at the International Crisis Group, a non-profit organization co-founded by George Soros that has Soros ’son Alex on the board. administration.
In May 2016, Alex posted a photo of Tarek, Mariam and her mother on her Facebook page, which was honored by the Asia Foundation for her work empowering women as the first lady of the Afghanistan. He called Tarek “one of the best friends I have.”
As vice president of his father’s Open Society Foundations, Alex, who hosted drunken hide-and-seek games with models and fashion designers at his “Club Soros” Hamptons mansion, has done many things to support his friend. In addition to his academic position, Tarek is a non-resident member of the Brookings Institute, a Washington think tank funded in part by the Open Society Foundations.
Tarek also has the support of other Democratic billionaires, and once oversaw grants at Humanity United, a nonprofit organization related to eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Two years ago, he worked as a national security and foreign policy adviser on the Buttigieg presidential campaign and has collaborated on articles in the journal Foreign Affairs, most recently on the effects of COVID-19 on the poorest countries. Of the world.
Although she is now a full-time professor in the film and video department at Bennington College in Vermont, Mariam called herself “a Brooklyn cliché” in a 2015 New York Times interview in which she talked about tomato picking. greens and their activism.
Last year, during the Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, he bitterly complained about police crackdowns on protesters in New York, comparing them to police violence in Afghanistan. . “So: we have a curfew, aerial surveillance and police with riot gear left over,” he posted next to a video of a helicopter boiling over his Brooklyn loft. “#NYC looks (and sounds) more like #Kabul all the time.”
Schneider, who has been helping desperate Afghans flee the country, said he has little patience for Ghanaians. “Seva [Ashraf’s] the daughter will never know why her Afghan sisters are going through, “he said.” She has only known peace and freedom in her life. “
Additional reports by Jon Levine